In a recent webinar, Fonoa's tax, engineering, and implementation teams shared what surprised them (and their customers) about building live e-invoicing integrations across four African markets. Here's what came up.

Keep in mind with Kenya’s e-invoicing 

The tax authority can see your stock levels

Kenya's e-invoicing mandate includes inventory-related fields on invoices, including item codes that give the Kenya Revenue Authority visibility into taxpayer stock. Carolina Silva, Fonoa's e-invoicing tax lead, explained what that means:

If you generate an invoice with something you don't have stock according to the tax authority, that can be rejected. This isn't being fully enforced yet, but it's a very clear signal of where things are headed."

Antonio K, who leads Fonoa's e-invoicing engineering team, described why this caught his team off guard:

We typically deal with invoices with some kind of transaction, cash is exchanging hands. We model our entire system against that. So when we saw stock management... if you are not the type of company that traditionally works with goods, perhaps most of your lines of business are services, perhaps you don't even have these capabilities."

For services businesses operating in Kenya, this may mean building an inventory workflow that didn't exist before.

Daily reconciliation is a compliance requirement, not a nice-to-have

Certified systems in Kenya must generate end-of-day Z reports and periodic ACS reports, and these must reconcile with the invoices transmitted to the tax authority during that period. Carolina noted this catches teams that are focused purely on getting individual invoices through. It's a separate obligation, and it's easy to miss until you're already live.

Since Kenya revoked its turnover threshold for eTIMS, every business operating in the country is in scope for these requirements, regardless of size.

Tips when it comes to e-invoicing in Ghana

You have weeks, not months, to get live once you're selected

Ghana's E-VAT mandate rolled out in phases, with the tax authority selecting businesses in batches. That's not unusual. What is unusual is the timeline: once selected, businesses typically have just a few weeks to adapt their systems, complete testing, and start issuing live invoices.

Carolina described the added complexity for larger organizations:

They need to support both old and new. It's tied with VAT registration, so it may mean that they have new and old entities being onboarded at different timings, or at the same timing, so it's hard."

If you have multiple entities under one umbrella in Ghana, you could be running parallel processes during transition, which gets messy fast if you haven't planned for it.

Accounts payable is in scope, not just accounts receivable

Ghana already requires businesses to report domestic purchase data. That puts the accounts payable side of the business in scope, not just accounts receivable. Ralph van Coevroden, Fonoa's Director of Solution Architecture and Support, explained why this trips people up:

In most companies, the AP and the AR teams are so far apart, they don't even know each other. It's very different processes, very different subsystems. But when mandates are coming for both AR and AP, those teams need to start understanding how the other part of the business works."

Carolina confirmed this isn't just a Ghana story:

In Ghana, you report domestic purchases, having this AP side of it. But then in Nigeria, you have another AP side of it, where to receive B2B invoices, it can only be through accredited providers."

Zimbabwe e-invoicing considerations

Physical devices fail at scale, sometimes taking operations down with them

Zimbabwe's fiscalization system is device-centric. The control sits in the fiscal device itself, which generates chain signatures and stores transaction data. For low-volume environments, it works. For anything else, Ralph was blunt:

If you need to cater for tens of thousands of transactions a day, think about restaurants, grocery stores, those devices can crash and burn. They could literally just go off, and then you're stuck, because you cannot fiscalize the sales. In some cases, you might even have to close the shop."

Antonio followed up:

We tried doing that as well. It turns out that electricity is also tricky, and stuff like that, things that you don't expect to happen, or expect them to happen very rarely, start happening a lot."

Zimbabwe does now offer a cloud-based integration option, which removes the hardware dependency for businesses that qualify.

One missed daily close blocks the next day's invoices entirely

Zimbabwe's fiscal devices enforce strict sequencing. If you don't properly close a fiscal day, the system blocks you from issuing invoices the following day. Carolina described it as "just as highly controlled and as unforgiving" as centralized clearance models. The control mechanism is just located in the device rather than a central platform.

Non-resident scope just expanded (as of January 2025)

There was a lot of confusion about whether non-resident digital service providers needed to engage with Zimbabwe's fiscalization system at all, especially after the introduction of a digital service tax withholding mechanism. Carolina shared what happened:

They have recently, this week, issued a new clarification that non-residents are still required to register for VAT, and if they register for VAT, then they must comply with the fiscalization system in place."

If you're a digital services business with customers in Zimbabwe, it's worth checking whether this changes anything for you.

Advice for e-invoicing in Nigeria 

Product codes go down to the species and gram weight

Nigeria's data quality requirements are strict across the board. Addresses must include zip code, city, state, and a local government field that most ERPs don't store. But the product specification codes are what really stand out.

Ralph shared an example:

Code 0105.14, it's poultry, live geese, weighing more than 185 grams. And if you want to get very specific, 010594, it's fowls with the species Gallus domesticus, weighing more than 185 grams. You can imagine the level of scrutiny. You have to know your products so well, and if your ERP system doesn't know them by code, it needs to, and it needs to do it fast."

Antonio described how customers sometimes react when Fonoa's validations flag these issues before invoices even reach the tax authority:

Sometimes clients ask us, why are you asking us all this information? Can you turn off all your validations? And then they're surprised to learn that it's not us who came up with these very specific and nuanced rules. It's the tax authorities."

Nigeria's four-corner model also sets it apart. Invoices must be routed through accredited access point providers rather than submitted directly to the tax authority. If you've built an integration assuming direct submission, Nigeria will require a rethink.

Learn more considerations the mandate documents don't tell you 

Stock management in Kenya, compressed onboarding in Ghana, device failures in Zimbabwe, goose-level product codes in Nigeria. These are the things that blow up timelines and run up costs when teams aren't prepared. For the full conversation, including the panel's advice on how to get ahead of these issues, watch the full webinar recording.